From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 9. I TEACH A RELIGIONLESS RELIGION
it is doesn’t matter; tell her to multiply it by as big a figure as you want – and before you have finished
writing that second figure down, the answer is there. Einstein said, ”If I had done it, it would have
taken at least three hours.”
But what is happening to this woman? She knows nothing about it. She says, ”Just simply looking
at the figures that have to be multiplied....” All that happens to her is a kind of silence; in that silence,
figures start coming up, and she starts speaking, ”Write down this figure... I don’t know how it
comes.” It seems from birth she has had a very sharp intelligence, so that within a flicker of the eye
something happens in her mind. And this is not the only case, there have been others.
A young boy, Shankaran, was so poor that he used to pull a rickshaw. Now, it is an ugly thing; it
should not exist anywhere: that a man is pulling a vehicle with you sitting in it! And he was just a
boy – but his father was old – and in Madras he was just pulling the rickshaw. The mathematics
department of the university became interested in him by accident. One day the professor, the head
of the department, went in his rickshaw and just started talking to him. He said, ”You are so young:
you should be reading and studying.”
The boy told him about his family. ”But,” the boy said, ”even without reading and studying – I know
that you teach mathematics – I can do mathematics. That, somehow I know.” The professor tried
him out, and he was amazed: the boy was a miracle. He sent the boy to Oxford, at his own expense,
to display his ability, and wherever he went he simply amazed great mathematicians. Rutherford
said that a certain question that had been bothering him for years, the boy solved within seconds.
And once he solved it, Rutherford saw that it was so simple – how was he missing it? Somehow he
had gone round and round, just missing that point, and this boy simply jumped on that point. But he
was not educated.
Intellect can be sharpened; there are ways to sharpen it. Modern psychology is trying to measure
it. I say don’t be foolish, don’t waste time in measuring it – what is there to measure? The average
person remains at the mental age of thirteen; he may be seventy but his mental age remains thirteen,
and he uses five to seven percent of his intelligence.... Now why waste time in finding more accurate
methods to measure it? Why not use methods which can sharpen the intellect? That is what I have
been teaching you.
If you doubt, your intellect will be sharpened.
If you believe, your intellect will get rusted, it will start gathering dust: you are not using it.
Doubt is bound to sharpen it, for a fundamental reason: you cannot remain at ease with doubt. You
have to do something about it; you have to find the answer. Till you find the answer the doubt is
going to harass you, nag you – and that’s the way doubt sharpens your intellect.
But all the religions teach that to doubt is sin, to believe is to be religious.
I say to you: to doubt is to be religious, and to believe is to be irreligious.
But those pseudo-religions were really cunning and clever. What psychologists have not found even
now, they found five thousand years ago: that doubt is dangerous, it sharpens intellect. Belief is
From Ignorance to Innocence 116 Osho